Smart Scopes: Good or bad or just plain horrible

[lykwydchykyn]

I don't think there's a need to tell users that every time they use a scope.

That's not what I was suggesting; I'm suggesting that message be popped up at some kind of "first run" point, or maybe when turning the feature on (assuming it were changed to opt-in). Obviously popping it up every time would be a useless annoyance.

I think Canonical provides sufficient notice as it stands.

What notice would that be? Is there anywhere in the OS where the user is informed of the Dash's behavior?

In any case, your suggested warning applies to everything we do on the web. Should Firefox display that warning everytime a link is clicked or form data posted? Honestly, the only difference I see here is that Canonical is trying to make a buck leveraging data that's gonna be there regardless.

Do I have to explain my point yet again? I *expect* a web browser to send data over the web. When I use a web browser, I use it with that reality in mind. When you open a terminal and type a command, do you *expect* your console session to be sent to a remote web server over unencrypted http? Would you be unpleasantly surprised to find out that it was? (No, before you attack that point as a strawman, I'm not saying that Ubuntu's terminal does that. It's a hypothetical comparison).

I don't think it's "sad". The net wasn't built with privacy in mind. I don't find what Canonical is doing with scopes to be a new or additional threat to my privacy. I'm not concerned about keeping my machine IP address private. If I want to keep something private, I don't expose it on the net, or only provide it to sources I decide have a stake in protecting that data.

You're proving my point. If you want to keep something private, you don't expose it on the net. But to do that you have to know when you are potentially exposing it to the net. I don't think there's any reason for you not to use smart scopes / dash search /etc. if you're comfortable with your data and IP being saved. But other people may have a reason, and they ought to know that it's happening. That's been my point all along.

[Skyline_8650]

The scopes are bad, it's sad to see them inside your OS. But I turn off the online search and don't have to look at them. But in order to have any privacy online, you have to in fact not get online at all. Anyone who is online and think's they have privacy are sadly misinformed. If it's not facebook and google then it's one of the thousands of online data miners ad bots with there cookies, if you block all that, Then it's the NSA and other government agencies.

[v1k1ng1001]

I like unity 2d in 12.04 and I loved 10.04 netbook edition which was simple and brilliant on a small device. Since then I have no idea what the developers are thinking.

I made mysef use unity on one machine through 13.04 and I'm totally over it. Hud, lenses and now scopes? Barf.

Gnome 3 and XFCE for me. Thanks.

[moshefeit]

I found it OK, and no problem bother me. Yeah, at first its kinda slow, but im getting used to lol

[malspa]

Well if someone truly thinks that Canonical is so horrible than why suggest him to use a Ubuntu spin which takes advantage of all of Ubuntu's infrastructure sans having its own DE and proprietary codecs by default? (Would it mean even more sellout?) Mint is more similar to Ubuntu than Ubuntu is to Debian, you may as well call it Mint-buntu. I always find it comical that some people rail against Canonical fanatically and then brag that they have switched to Mint.

I feel the same way.

Personally I switch off online search so I am fine with it. However, I think it should be an opt-in feature for those who wants it. Also I think "spying" is an exaggeration, but still it seems underhanded to have it on by default and it generates unnecessary controversies and give ammunitions to Ubuntu haters.

That, as well, sums things up for me.

To the OP: I was leaning towards voting for choice #3, but I'm with monkeybrain, the opt-out part is what kinda bugs me; I'll have to pass on casting a vote. Sorry.

I would like to see what viking777 wrote here:

The second method is to ask people during the distro install/upgrade if they want to have them or not. Add another screen explaining what scopes are, explaining why some people are concerned about them and allowing each individual to choose to install or otherwise. This is in the spirit of Linux. For those that choose to install them, then at first boot up they should be presented with the choice to enable them all, choose which to enable, or enable them at a later time, they should never be enabled by default.

But, whatever, my feeling is that I can choose not to use Ubuntu, and if I run Ubuntu then I can choose not to use Unity, and if I run Unity I can choose to turn that search stuff off. It's still a free Linux distro; they can ship it with that stuff turned on by default -- it's their distro -- but I can still choose to use it as I please.

For the people who have serious issues with it, it's probably a good thing if you keep complaining about it, maybe it'll do some good, maybe not. If it bothered me that much, though, I'd probably just not use Ubuntu, end of story.

[Matt12334]

While I'm really not concerned about privacy issues, I'm absolutely furious that they chose to force these stupid "smart" scopes into the OS, with no simple way to remove them. My dash was horrifically slow (on a new Haswell i7 machine with an SSD), and removing and disabling the unnecessary scopes caused severe instability in my system. They are a bad joke, that's what they are! I'll be sicking to 13.04 until they pull their heads out of their body cavities and fix this garbage. If it's not fixed by 14.04, I'm either sticking with 13.04 or moving to a new DE. As much as I love Unity, I'm after functionality without compromises, and I won't have that disgusting malware in my dash.